An interesting point about the high-level departures from Microsoft

Both Mini-MSFT and Joe Wilcox pointed this out. Microsoft isn’t replacing their high-level executives with internals. Bill Gates leaves, Ray Ozzie is hired to replace him. Jeff Raikes leaves, Stephen Elop replaces him. I’m not sure about some of the other executive departures yet, their replacements haven’t been announced as far as I can tell.

Why would Microsoft do this? Are they looking for folks without a lot of MS baggage who can shake things up? Are they looking for specific skills and experience they can use to compete? Or do they just feel like there isn’t anyone internal up to the task?

No matter what the reasons, this has got to be a major morale killer inside the company. If I was a director or VP or wanna-be executive, the message would be that my best chance of advancement was to leave because it seems like experience inside of MS isn’t valued inside of MS.

Network Solutions is evil

I’ve been a network solutions customer for many many years now. Partially, because when I first registered my domains, they were the only registrar. Later, I would occasionally register a new domain with them if it was important. I never trusted GoDaddy or some of the other discount registrars, NetSol seemed to be more professional and trust-worthy.

No longer… they just jumped to the front of the evil queue.

Network Solutions Using Questionable Tactic to Sell More Domain Names

As of Tuesday, if a user does a search on the site for a domain name, Network Solution immediately registers the domain in their own name. If the user then goes to a discount registrar to register the domain, it shows as unavailable. The user must then either not buy the domain, or go back to Network Solutions and pay their $35/year fee.

What does the new Mac Pro announcement say about the MacWorld Keynote

For those of us who have been waiting for a MacPro upgrade, today is a great day. New Mac Pros with 8 cores of Penryn power, new high-end video cards, all quite exciting.

You would think that this is something that Steve Jobs might want to announce from the stage in his keynote next week. So why announce it today?

Maybe they were holding back this announcement in case another one fell through… Maybe compared to the other announcements they were worried that this one might have gotten lost in the shuffle? Maybe it is to suck some of the attention away from all the announcements at CES?

This certainly ups the anty for next week.

[update: Here is Gizmodo’s take, they agree with me]

My favorite posts of 2007

Everybody else is doin’ it, so why not me?

January 2007

February 2007

March 2007

April 2007

May 2007

June 2007

July 2007

August 2007

September 2007

October 2007

November 2007

December 2007

Alex Iskold’s tips for startups

36 Startup Tips: From Software Engineering to PR and More – ReadWriteWeb

This is a collection of startup tips covering software engineering, infrastructure, PR, conferences, legal and finance. They describe best practices for an early-stage startup. We hope that you will find these tips useful, but also please remember that they are based on subjective experiences and not all of them will be applicable to your company.

These tips are great for web startups. They are pretty useful for non-web startups as well. I’ve been through the startup mill myself a couple times and I still got some good pointers.